1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the field of data processing and digital content systems. More particularly, and without limitation, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for identifying thumbnail images for videos to, for example, attract interaction or interest from users.
2. Background Information
Publishers of content on the Internet tend to be dependent upon advertising for revenue. For example, various types of web sites, blogs, social networks, and web-based service sites use advertising as a significant source of income to offset the costs associated with offering content and/or services to their users. When a user requests a specific web page, a corresponding web server (either alone or in conjunction with other servers), may identify advertisements or promotions to be displayed as part of the web page. For example, a server may attach instructions for a client computer to request an appropriate promotion from an ad server. Additionally, or alternatively, instructions may be provided to insert an image or other content associated with the promotion into the web page.
In some situations, advertisements or content promoted to users may be in the form of videos. There are many example situations where a publisher may present advertisements or content to a user in the form of a video. For example, a company might develop a promotional video to advertise a new product. A news organization may create videos of news reports to increase traffic to its website. A “viral” video creator could want to drive traffic to his videos because of advertising embedded in each video. A gadget enthusiast website may provide “how to” videos demonstrating how to use various electronic devices to users that are browsing news articles about those electronic devices. Producers or directors may create trailers (e.g., previews) of their shows, movies, or documentaries to a website for display to users. Non-profit organizations may create video testimonials from their beneficiaries in order to entice users to donate. Video game enthusiasts may create “speedrun” or “walk-through” videos that demonstrate how to accomplish a particular goal in a video game. In addition, when searching a database or other resource (including the Internet) to identify relevant videos, it may be desirable to provide information about the identified videos as part of the search results displayed to a user. Whatever the situation, there are many situations where driving traffic to videos or otherwise conveying information about the videos is desirable.
However, attempting to drive traffic to or provide information about such videos using text hyperlinks and/or descriptions can have mixed results. For example, if a series of hyperlinks and/or descriptions are listed on a web page and only some of those links lead to videos, users may not notice that certain links lead to videos and may not click on the links.
Some websites promote videos to users using thumbnails of the videos (e.g., specific images extracted from a video). These thumbnail images may be automatically selected. For example, the first frame of the video may be automatically selected as the thumbnail for a video. However, if the first frame of the video is a black frame or is otherwise non-unique, the selected thumbnail image may fail to attract interest from users.
Thumbnails may also be selected manually by a person (e.g., an editor). However, this is time-consuming in that it requires a person to go through each video to select a thumbnail from that video, keeping in mind that the thumbnail should attract users.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for improved systems and methods for selecting thumbnail images for videos. The selected thumbnails may be used in promoting or identifying videos to users. One of ordinary skill will understand from this disclosure that other uses for the presented embodiments are possible as well.